


we'll watch the buildings turn to dust

by kathillards



Category: Kamen Rider Decade
Genre: Multi, mentions of super hero taisen events and characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-20 11:39:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11920107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathillards/pseuds/kathillards
Summary: Tsukasa’s pictures start coming out better. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why.





	we'll watch the buildings turn to dust

The way the sun glints golden off Natsumi’s hair in the photograph makes her look a little like she’s glowing. It’s summer and she’s on the streets, walking backward to talk to him at the same time, and the blur of the people crossing the road behind her makes the whole picture look like a frozen movie scene.

Yusuke sees it first when he gets it developed and says, with no small amount of surprise in his voice, “That actually looks a real photograph, Tsukasa.”

“Your support is inspiring, as always,” Tsukasa says, but as he holds the photograph up to the light, he has to admit that Yusuke has a point.

.

“I don’t like it,” Natsumi says, her nose scrunched up as she surveys the picture.

“What?” Tsukasa snatches it back. “Why not? It didn’t come out double exposed, and you actually look like a human in it… what’s the matter with it?”

“I’m not smiling in it,” she says, jabbing a finger at the expression on her face – somewhere between exasperation and amusement, as it usually is when she talks to Tsukasa. “Remember those ones you took in Nega World? Before they turned into negatives? Those were good pictures.”

“Just because you’re not smiling in it doesn’t mean it’s not a good photo.”

“Just because it didn’t come out double exposed doesn’t mean it’s a good photo,” she retorts, but she doesn’t protest when he pointedly sets in the ‘Put Tsukasa’s Good Photos Here’ box that he created just for the occasion.

.

Yusuke is easy to get a good picture of;  it’s rarer to see him without a smile than with one. Tsukasa waits until he’s not paying attention, leaning over the table to laugh at a video Natsumi is showing him, before snapping a photo.

This one comes out more grainy and yellow, just because of the lighting in the room. Still, Yusuke stands out amongst the monocolored background, his dark hair flopping into his eyes and a smile stretching his cheek so wide, you’d be surprised if it didn’t crack his face.

Natsumi picks it up and examines it in the light of the lamp. “You should take more pictures of Yusuke.”

“I would, but you’re always ruining them,” Tsukasa says, then quickly ducks before she can pressure point him.

.

He overhears Yusuke saying to Daiki once, “How come you’re never in any of our pictures?”

Daiki scoffs and tosses the photograph he’d been looking at – Yusuke and Natsumi, arguing over baking, both of them covered in flour – back at Yusuke. “Tsukasa’s the photographer. Why don’t you ask him?”

“I think he thinks you don’t want to be in them,” Yusuke suggests gently.

Daiki’s gaze slants over to him, a mutinous set to his mouth. “Why would I want to be?”

“Because you’re one of us,” Yusuke says, and lays a hand on Daiki’s shoulder. For a moment, Tsukasa thinks Daiki is going to shake it off and shove him away, but he only tenses a little and doesn’t move. “Aren’t you?”

Daiki glances away. “You wish,” he says, and Yusuke smiles.

.

“Oi, Tsukasa,” says Daiki a few days later, and tosses his camera at him before he can react. “I’m leaving. Thought you’d like something to remember me by.”

Tsukasa blinks down at his camera. “When did you take this?”

“Not important,” Daiki dismisses. “See you around.” He points his fingers in a gun and pretends to shoot him before heading out the door. Tsukasa stares after him for a moment then heaves a sigh. If there was anyone in any Earth who could match him in dramatics, it was Daiki.

When he gets the photographs developed, they’re predictably all of Daiki making various faces into the camera. He’s somehow mastered the art of taking pictures of his own face without having someone else hold the camera.

It’s the last picture that gives him pause – far enough away that he had to have asked someone to take it for him. Tsukasa imagines Natsumi behind the camera – it could be Yusuke, but Natsumi has the skill, and Daiki knows it – framing Daiki in front of a bridge. His face is tilted to the side, shadows and sunlight dancing over his jawline in equal measure.

Above him, the sun is burning. He’s leaning slightly on the bridge, elbow propped up on the wood, his gaze dark and volatile where it meets the camera. Everything about the picture, from the lighting to the angle to the crispness of the way it came out screams _Daiki_.

Maybe he’d been right. Maybe Tsukasa did need something to remember him by.

.

“He’s coming back, right?”

It’s been two weeks, so Tsukasa thinks he can be forgiven for the small note of worry that seeps into his voice when he poses the question to Natsumi. She barely glances up from her notebook of client appointments.

“Of course he is. You think he can survive without us for that long?”

Tsukasa shrugs, setting his camera down on her desk. “You think we can survive without him?”

He presses the button to snap a photo when she moves her head, looking up at him in deep thought. Her hand is still curled around her pen, and if he tilts the photograph around later, he can see her writing ‘Daiki Kaitou’ under the list entitled ‘people to call’.

.

Yusuke is serious when he’s training. Tsukasa practices with him sometimes, but sometimes, he’s content to sit behind him and watch as he goes through his motions, his eyebrows drawn in concentration as his arms and legs move in tandem.

Tsukasa takes a picture at every kata. Eventually, Yusuke stops and comes over to him for a bottle of water.

“We’ve been in this world a week and your pictures are still coming out okay?” he asks, tipping his head back to take a long gulp.

Tsukasa watches the way his throat bobs with the movement, then says, “I don’t think the worlds affect my pictures anymore.”

“Lucky for us,” Yusuke says with a smile. “You could put together a decent portfolio with these new ones. Wonder what the difference is, though…”

He wanders back to the yard to continue his training. Tsukasa watches him go and thinks he has a niggling suspicion what it might be.

.

He knows something’s happening when he goes to meet the pirate who calls himself a superhero, so he leaves the camera at home. No point in Shocker getting a hold of it. Natsumi will take care of it, if worse comes to worse.

When he meets Captain Marvelous, though, he regrets leaving it behind. The picture of the pirate, leaning against the back wall of a bar filled with smoke and the scent of alcohol, his coat flaring behind him would have been impressive, undoubtedly.

The picture of him leaning over the table with a smirk on his lips as he makes an irreverent taunt about Kamen Riders being easy to kill would have made a better one.

Still, Tsukasa thinks, as they formulate their plan, he has the strangest feeling that any pictures he might take of Captain Marvelous would never turn out as clean and clear as the ones he takes of his team.

.

When Daiki gives him the camera back, amidst ruin and rubble and wounds he knows will scar, there are pictures on it that he’s pretty sure he didn’t take. He goes to a different photography studio to get them developed, not yet ready to go home.

These pictures aren’t of Daiki. They’re of everyone around him, the people he had been with when Tsukasa had been fighting him, the people he’d betrayed. Doc, with his mop of curls and an ever-present smile beneath the surface of his face that reminds Tsukasa irrepressibly of Yusuke, and Hina, with gentle eyes and a set to her shoulders that nonethless radiated strength, and Joe –

There are more pictures of Joe than the others. He gets them developed one by one and finds that Joe isn’t looking into the camera in most of them, no doubt taken with the kind of stealth that made Daiki such a good thief. He’s always sure to get Joe’s entire ponytail in the shot, his long, dark hair gleaming under the lights. That’s the first constant – the other is the look on Joe’s face, always a mixture of thoughtful and wary and maybe a little impressed. A lot annoyed. Most of it directed at Daiki, even when he didn’t know the pictures were being taken.

One of them has him facing the camera. In this one, he’s angry, a sword glinting in his hands just barely out of frame. Tsukasa wonders at that – at the picture, if he’d been angry at Daiki or someone else, how Daiki had managed to take it.

What it had been like, on that ship, floating over Earth. To work with the Gokaigers, to trust them to the point that he’d walked into battle for Joe, to turn against Tsukasa…

He swallows and pulls out his phone to call Natsumi. Maybe the reason he’s avoiding home is because he knows that’s where Daiki will be – and maybe Daiki deserves to go home more than him.

.

He gets over it eventually, and walks back into Hikari studios to find Daiki lounging on the couch, the others nowhere to be seen. He’s got his gun in his hands, twirling it around, when he notices Tsukasa in the doorway.

Before he can say anything, Tsukasa holds up the developed pictures. Daiki stares at them – at the one on top, of Joe almost-smiling in the soft golden lights of the Galleon – and then at him.

Tsukasa’s throat feels dry when he says, “I didn’t forget you.”

Daiki stands up, but doesn’t move towards him. “I don’t care.”

“Then why are you back?” Tsukasa challenges, stepping closer.

“Maybe I like Natsumi and Yusuke,” Daiki suggests, lips curving in a smirk. “Don’t you have your pirate boyfriend now, anyway?”

There’s a snort somewhere behind him – probably Yusuke.

“Don’t _you_?” Tsukasa says, and tosses the pictures of Joe and Doc and Hina at him. Daiki catches them effortlessly and snorts.

“Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

“You nearly _killed me_ ,” Tsukasa protests. “And tried to destroy the world. _I’m_ the one who’s jealous?”

“Well,” Daiki drawls, and holds up a particularly striking photograph of Joe. “My pictures are better than yours.”

Tsukasa gapes at him. “You’re – you’re not even a photographer.”

“And yet here we are.”

.

“Thank god you two made up,” says Natsumi with no small amount of dryness to her tone. She swings her legs on the table she’s sitting at, watching him dunk his photographs aggressively in the liquid buckets to develop them. “I was beginning to worry it would affect your work…”

Tsukasa glances up at her with a scowl. “My pictures are good now,” he says insistently.

Natsumi sighs deeply. He grabs one that’s finished developing and thrusts it at her face. It’s of Yusuke, training with a sword, the silver of it gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. The angle makes him look taller than he is, imposing and powerful. Tsukasa almost wishes he’d double exposed it over a picture of Kuuga.

“Way better than that picture of Joe,” he says decisively.

Natsumi hops down and plucks the photograph from his hands. “You’re both impossible.”

“I’m a good photographer,” he says, mouth twisting in a pout. She rolls her eyes. “I _am_.”

“Yeah,” Natsumi says, and reaches out to pull another one that’s finished developing. “But only when it’s us.”

Tsukasa stares at the photograph she offers him, the image of Daiki looking back at him with those wild, dark eyes, a smirk on his face and his hair windswept and messy. Beneath his black leather jacket, his shirt is blue streaked with pink. The colors bounce off each other in a way that makes it hard to look away.

“Yeah,” he echoes, carefully taking the picture from Natsumi. “Only when it’s you guys.”

.

Yusuke says, leaning over the sofa where Daiki is sprawled, “We should go on an adventure. Like old times.”

“You mean when every other Rider was trying to kill me?” Tsukasa asks, narrowing his eyes. Yusuke only smiles at him.

“He’s right,” Natsumi says, glancing around at the four of them, all lounging in various places in the living room. “We haven’t done anything all together in a while.”

“Whose fault is that?” Daiki mutters. Tsukasa throws a pillow at him, which he catches with a bark of laughter.

“We need a world,” Yusuke muses, ignoring both of them. “A completely new world, that we haven’t already messed up.”

“I’m sure we can find one,” Tsukasa says, dropping his head back over the armrest of the couch so he can see the backdrop that always takes them wherever they need to go. He frowns at it for a moment, tuning out the thoughtful speculations of the other three as Natsumi outlines the worlds they’ve already been to and Daiki interjects to point out how each world had been uniquely terrible, even though he does so with a smile hidden in his voice.

Tsukasa draws himself up several moments later and raises his camera to take a picture of them. The other three are so embroiled in their conversation, they don’t notice until the click of the photograph.

“Hey,” Yusuke protests, with no real heat.

“Still trying to get better?” Daiki asks, grinning.

Natsumi nudges him and he gives up the camera to her. “I think we should find a world where Tsukasa can take bad photos again.”

“You don’t like them?” Tsukasa asks.

“No, I like them.” Natsumi lifts the camera just slightly and angles it at his face. “But I miss the bad ones, too.”

Tsukasa lets her snap a picture of him, then takes the camera back, springing to his feet. “All right, then. Let’s go find a world that hates me again.”

“Just like old times,” Daiki says, trading a look with Yusuke that borders heavily on fondness. Tsukasa grins at them, then at Natsumi, who smiles back.

The backdrop changes into a flowering forest, a new world to explore. Even before they all get up to go, though, Tsukasa knows this one isn’t going to be one of the bad ones. Not with all four of them together, their laughter echoing through the worlds.


End file.
